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The world’s first, full-service conservative Internet broadcast networkSat, 10 Dec 2016 01:41:13 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.116302432Maine prohibits lottery winners from receiving food stamps. Wait… what?http://hotair.com/archives/2016/10/30/maine-prohibits-lottery-winners-receiving-food-stamps-wait/
Sun, 30 Oct 2016 22:31:48 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3929412were getting food stamps?]]>Maine’s Governor Paul LePage has been at the center of more than his fair share of controversy since taking office, but one area where there seems to be little disagreement is over the fact that he’s been good to his word on cutting the budget. Much to the chagrin of Social Justice Warriors, LePage has made a priority of ensuring that public assistance was only going to those who are actually in need, eliminating a lot of fraud and abuse from the system. One way he did that was by requiring younger, childless, able bodied individuals who are receiving food stamps to either be working a part time job or to put in some time working for the state or getting job training. That single move led to a massive drop in the food stamp roles and significant savings for the taxpayers.

Now he’s moved on to another aspect of the food stamp program which is, at least to me, a bit more puzzling. A new regulation will forbid lottery winners (above a certain level of winnings) from receiving SNAP assistance. (Daily Caller)

Maine has instituted a new rule that bans those who win more than $5,000 a month by gambling or the lottery from getting food stamps benefits, the state announced Tuesday.

Gov. Paul LePage approved the rule as part of a series of strict measures to reduce the state’s dependence on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also called food stamps, in Maine.

“In no way, shape or form should taxpayers be asked to foot the bill for someone who is gambling and winning huge amounts of money,” Maine Department of Health and Human Services commissioner Mary Mayhew said in a statement. “Welfare benefits shouldn’t be used for gambling or lottery, and someone who beats the long odds and ‘wins big’ shouldn’t continue receiving assistance while he or she has that money.”

I suppose the first question which jumped to my mind when I read this story was… lottery winners are collecting food stamps? The SNAP program is not only just a course of last resort for those who have fallen on seriously hard times, but I would imagine that it’s not something most people are particularly proud of to begin with. (I don’t mean there’s shame in getting help when you need it, but people tend to not like to admit that they’ve fallen behind.) This doesn’t apply to someone who hit twenty bucks on a scratch off, but if you landed one of the big cash prizes or some sort of thousand dollars a week for life payouts, would you really continue to go to the store and pay for your purchases with food stamps? I suppose it must be happening or there wouldn’t be a need for the law, but it certainly seems odd.

Still, the Governor seems to be satisfied with not only the need for the law, but with the results. He gave a rather succinct public comment identifying who should or should not be on the SNAP roles.

“Most Mainers would agree that before someone receives taxpayer-funded welfare benefits, they should sell non-essential assets and use their savings,” LePage said when the asset testing rule was approved last fall. “Hardworking Mainers should not come home to see snowmobiles, four-wheelers or Jet Skis in the yards of those who are getting welfare. Welfare is a last resort, not a way of life.”

Nothing much to argue about here. If you are taking in more than $60K per year you are well above the national median in terms of income. You obviously don’t need food stamps at that point. But unlike the previous work requirements which were passed, I’ll be interested to see how much money the state actually saves. Are there really that many lottery winners out there still collecting SNAP benefits?

]]>3929412Renewed requirement of work for SNAP recipients produces predictable liberal backlashhttp://hotair.com/archives/2016/04/03/renewed-requirement-of-work-for-snap-recipients-produces-predictable-liberal-backlash/
Sun, 03 Apr 2016 21:01:16 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3899646There used to be a rule in place – part of the sadly abandoned movements toward welfare reform in the 80s and 90s – which required food stamps recipients to do at least some work in order to receive the benefits if they were childless and able bodied. That rule was suspended in most places since the beginning of the crash in 2007, but now that unemployment is allegedly back down to nominal levels and the economy is “stable” across most of the country, that exception is being rolled back. This, of course, has liberals up in arms. (WaPo)

The 20-year-old rule — which was suspended in many states during the economic recession — requires that adults without children or disabilities must have a job in order to receive food stamps through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for more than three months, with some exceptions. Many states have begun to reimpose the federal rule as the economy recovers, with the largest group reviving it at the beginning of this year. As a result, many recipients’ three-month limit expires today, April 1.

The change has reignited a fierce debate between conservative leaders, who say waiving the mandate discourages people from working, and their liberal counterparts, who say the three-month time limit ignores the reality that jobs are still hard to come by for low-skilled workers.

Ah, yes. Those hateful Republicans are at it again, trying to demonize and punish the poor. But while we consider this question, let’s keep in mind that an experiment in precisely such a change has already been rolling out in Maine. We talked about this last month when the Left was all aflutter over that state’s decision to require ABAWD (able bodied adults without dependents) to put in some work while remaining on the SNAP program long term.

In the first three months after Maine’s work policy went into effect, its caseload of able-bodied adults without dependents plummeted by 80 percent, falling from 13,332 recipients in Dec. 2014 to 2,678 in March 2015.

There were plenty of job openings in Maine already and the result of that work requirement was a major savings for the taxpayer. As they found out, those who truly couldn’t work or needed to care for children were easily able to demonstrate that and their benefits continued uninterrupted. But a significant number of recipients were either able to find a job or, as it turned out, had been working under the table to avoid taxes and collecting benefits on top of that. Those individuals dropped off the rolls quickly.

As I noted last month, we can see the direct effect of going in the opposite direction on such policy by looking at New York City, where Mayor Bill de Blasio has essentially thrown welfare reform into reverse.

The number of New Yorkers on welfare is reportedly on the rise, with about 13,000 more people being added to the rolls during the mayor’s first year in office.

The New York Post is reporting that the cash assistance program swelled by 4 percent in 2014.

According to an advanced look at the “Poverty and Progress in New York” report, the jump comes the same year the city added around 90,000 jobs.

When you remove work requirements entirely for the childless, able bodied recipients, there will always be some percentage who will seek to game the system for their own advantage. That’s just a fact of life. (And before you get your liberal undies in a twist, this applies across all demographic lines.) These programs aren’t “punishing” anyone or discriminating. They are providing an incentive toward upward mobility and ensuring that only those truly in need are drawing down resources from the system.

]]>3899646Maine required healthy, childless food stamp recipients to work, and…http://hotair.com/archives/2016/02/10/maine-required-healthy-childless-food-stamp-recipients-to-work-and/
http://hotair.com/archives/2016/02/10/maine-required-healthy-childless-food-stamp-recipients-to-work-and/#commentsWed, 10 Feb 2016 14:21:34 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3893141It’s a case of miracles and wonders up in the Pine Tree State, folks. A report from Rachel Sheffield and Robert Rector at the Daily Signal takes a look at welfare programs and efforts to reform them, particularly in the area of food stamps. They note that one of the fastest growing segments of welfare programs over the last decade has been applications for food stamps by ABAWDs, or able bodied adults without children between the ages of 18 and 49. These are folks who are determined to be otherwise able to work but without a source of income. The total cost of these programs in 2014 was $83.1B.

In Maine they took some steps to make the program more efficient last year, much to the dismay of social justice advocates. The Governor put a new program in place which requires ABAWDs desiring food stamps to put in some effort.

In response to the growth in food stamp dependence, Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, recently established work requirements on recipients who are without dependents and able-bodied. In Maine, all able-bodied adults without dependents in the food stamp program are now required to take a job, participate in training, or perform community service.

Job openings for lower-skill workers are abundant in Maine, and for those ABAWD recipients who cannot find immediate employment, Maine offers both training and community service slots. But despite vigorous outreach efforts by the government to encourage participation, most childless adult recipients in Maine refused to participate in training or even to perform community service for six hours per week. When ABAWD recipients refused to participate, their food stamp benefits ceased.

You’ll note that the requirements here aren’t exactly onerous. If you do have some sort of employment you’re supposed to report it. If not, the job training programs are free. And if you don’t wish to do either, you can put in six hours of community service per week. That doesn’t exactly take up all your free time, and yet the number of people who rejected all of those options was overwhelming.

So how did that shake out?

In the first three months after Maine’s work policy went into effect, its caseload of able-bodied adults without dependents plummeted by 80 percent, falling from 13,332 recipients in Dec. 2014 to 2,678 in March 2015.

That’s an 80% drop in 90 days. How astounding is that? And it represents a serious savings for the taxpayers in terms of keeping the state’s budget afloat, though the majority of the cash comes from the federal government. But what of all the people who were no longer receiving the benefit? Are they starving? As it turns out, the study shows that a substantial number of recipients were working “off the books.” (And likely not paying taxes on their income either.) That allowed them to qualify for any number of social welfare programs while still having a cash income. Those folks dropped off the rolls quickly rather than have to own up to their income.

The number of New Yorkers on welfare is reportedly on the rise, with about 13,000 more people being added to the rolls during the mayor’s first year in office.

The New York Post is reporting that the cash assistance program swelled by 4 percent in 2014.

According to an advanced look at the “Poverty and Progress in New York” report, the jump comes the same year the city added around 90,000 jobs.

Are we to believe that Maine is somehow unique, with an extraordinary number of residents signing up on the dole when they don’t actually qualify or are otherwise able to work but choose not to? Or perhaps New York City is just a mecca for paragons of honesty who would never short sheet the system. Both are unlikely. Welfare reform (or workfare, as we once called it) is being crushed by progressive elements at all levels of government and the results speak for themselves. What’s happening in Maine should be the benchmark for how to move forward rather than a target of criticism by Democrats.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2016/02/10/maine-required-healthy-childless-food-stamp-recipients-to-work-and/feed/943893141New Louisiana governor to undo welfare reformhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/22/new-louisiana-governor-to-undo-welfare-reform/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/22/new-louisiana-governor-to-undo-welfare-reform/#commentsTue, 22 Dec 2015 21:01:07 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3888178Hope and change is coming to Louisiana after the defeat of David Vitter last month. John Bel Edwards swept to victory by a double digit margin and let everyone know that he was going to start changing up the game. Now, well before he’s even taken the oath of office, Edwards is prepping for some of his first big reforms in the financially troubled state. One of the top items on his docket is getting rid of the work requirement for able bodied food stamp recipients. (WDSU News)

Gov.-elect John Bel Edwards intends to remove work requirements that Gov. Bobby Jindal has enacted for more than 60,000 food stamp recipients.

Edwards sent a letter Monday to the U.S. Department of Agriculture saying he will seek a federal waiver of the work requirements. The governor-elect says Louisiana’s unemployment rate qualifies it to skip the work mandate.

He’s asking the USDA and the state social services department to stop any interruption of benefits until Edwards can reapply for the waiver that Jindal allowed to expire.

This reform was supposed to kick in on January 1st and would have required able bodied individuals with no children between the ages of 18 and 49 to participate in 20 hours of work per week or be enrolled in a work training program to qualify for benefits. (Not exactly onerous conditions.) And, of course, there would be easily obtainable exceptions for those with disabilities or other complicating factors which prohibited working. But as with most Democrat administrations, that was too much of a burden to put on anyone.

It’s not as if this is a unique situation in states and cities where Democrats take power. We already discussed the situation in New York City which is pretty much a direct parallel. As soon as Bill de Blasio took over as Mayor of the Big Apple he began peeling back decades of welfare reform which had taken the city from cash assistance rolls in excess of one million down to barely 20% of their historic highs. As a result, while 2015 saw economic recovery finally making its way to the city with tens of thousands of new jobs opening up, the welfare rolls actually rose dramatically. (A trend projected to continue well into the coming year.)

New York City never really went truly conservative, but this is one area where working class residents finally grew fed up with the situation and voted in leaders who promised reform. Louisiana is much closer to being a red area than New York City will ever be so it will be instructive to see how the working residents of the state react to these “reforms” as the process rolls out. But hey… you asked for John Bel Edwards, Louisiana. Now you’ve got him.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/22/new-louisiana-governor-to-undo-welfare-reform/feed/913888178More Wisconsin residents are headed back to work thanks to welfare reformhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/04/more-wisconsin-residents-are-headed-back-to-work-thanks-to-welfare-reform/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/04/more-wisconsin-residents-are-headed-back-to-work-thanks-to-welfare-reform/#commentsFri, 04 Dec 2015 23:01:25 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3886034After enforcing federal work requirements for its food stamp program, Wisconsin has found work for thousands of recipients, and cleaned the rolls of many ineligible enrollees.

In April 2015, the Badger State began requiring able-bodied adults without children to work or participate in an employment training program for at least 20 hours a week in order to receive food stamps. If they refuse to work or prepare for work, they are limited to three months of benefits. Although this has been mandated under federal law since the 1990s, Wisconsin – like most states – had waived the work requirement in recent years.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker explained that the policy shift was designed to help people “be prepared to help themselves.”

“If someone is an adult, who is able to work and they don’t have children, we ask that they be enrolled in one of our job training programs and they go out with our assistance and look for work.”

Republican state Rep. Mark Born, chairman of the State Assembly’s Committee on Public Benefit Reform, said that the work requirement was designed to “help guide able-bodied adults back into the workforce, or put them on the path to gainful employment while remaining on FoodShare.” Born explained that the new policy was “working as intended” and helping thousands of individuals “secure employment as a result.”

“It is important we continue to enact reforms and transition people from reliance on government to independence.”

Critics of the changes claim that the new policy “could cause massive food shortages in food pantries.” But those dire warnings aren’t supported by evidence in other states that have restored work requirements.

Maine instituted similar reforms in 2014 and has seen dependence on food stamps drop to historic lows. But even people like Arthur Carter, who runs a food pantry in the poorest county in Maine, support the new policy. Other non-profits also support the changes, having witnessed a surge in volunteers from able-bodied adults seeking to meet the new requirements.

Mary Mayhew, Commissioner of the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, explained that the reforms will help move more people back into the labor force and out of government dependency.

“I am extremely pleased to hear that organizations are seeing an increase in volunteerism, and individuals willing to come in and help.

This effort to benefit from employment training, or to volunteer, is what will help individuals out of poverty to ultimately help themselves.”

Kansas is a perfect example of what can happen in a state that enforces federal work requirements.

After Kansas restored work requirements in 2013, the work participation rate among enrollees nearly tripled and average income more than doubled. Those cycling off the program also increased their employment and income, which more than offset the benefits they lost as a result of reform efforts.

That’s a significant improvement for a group of people who were previously depending upon the government to put food on the table. Working can lead these enrollees out of the cycle of government dependence, out of poverty and onto a path toward prosperity. All of that motivated by a requirement to work.

Despite what the main-stream media may have you believe, welfare reform is incredibly popular. A remarkable 82% of Americans support work requirements for welfare programs, and asset tests are supported by 79%.

More than 20 states have committed to enforcing work requirements for their food stamp programs in 2016. Whether in Wisconsin, Kansas, or other states, work requirements for able-bodied, childless adults enable enrollees to move off of government assistance and onto the path of self-reliance. This is something to be championed, regardless of how the media attempts to spin it.

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Kristina Ribali is the Senior Coalitions Director for the Foundation for Government Accountability. Follow Kristina on Twitter for the latest on welfare and health care reform.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/12/04/more-wisconsin-residents-are-headed-back-to-work-thanks-to-welfare-reform/feed/263886034Massachusetts woman pleads guilty to $3.6 million food stamp fraud schemehttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/07/massachusetts-woman-pleads-guilty-to-3-6-million-food-stamp-fraud-scheme/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/07/massachusetts-woman-pleads-guilty-to-3-6-million-food-stamp-fraud-scheme/#commentsWed, 07 Oct 2015 23:21:40 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3879707Welfare programs often account for a state’s largest and fastest-growing budget line items, and as these programs grow, the likelihood of waste, fraud, and abuse grows too. Welfare fraud robs resources from those who are truly needy, and stories like this are infuriating.

Vida Ofori Causey, a 45-year-old convenience store owner in Worchester, Massachusetts, was charged in a federal court last week after she pled guilty to a multimillion dollar food stamp fraud scheme.

Food stamps are administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) through the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), and eligible low-income individuals and families receive monetary benefits they can exchange for approved food items at retail store that are authorized to accept SNAP payments.

According to a press release from the Department of Justice, Causey purchased SNAP benefits from recipients at a discounted value, about fifty cents on the dollar, instead of exchanging them for food. Over a four and half year period, Causey defrauded the USDA of approximately $3,638,900 in SNAP funds in total.

Normally, SNAP benefits cannot be used for alcohol, cigarettes, or other restricted items. But since Causey was paying cash to the SNAP recipients, they could then use that cash to buy restricted items, or even illegal drugs, as The Daily Caller pointed out.

The charges against Causey include one count of conspiracy to commit SNAP benefits fraud, one count of SNAP fraud, and one count of money laundering. A federal district court judge will sentence Causey soon, based on the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, which provide for maximum sentences of five years in prison and three years supervised release for the conspiracy charge, 20 years in prison and three years supervised release for SNAP fraud, and 10 years in prison and three years supervised release for money laundering. Causey is also facing a fine of up to $250,000 or twice the gross gain or loss, whichever is greater, for each charge, plus forfeiture and restitution.

Fraud in the food stamp program has long been a major concern for many taxpayers, and while there are some states like Maine and Kansas working hard to curb and stop widespread abuse, reports like this from Massachusetts show there’s still much work to be done. With the number of SNAP recipients exploding from 17 million participants in 2000 to over 47 million in 2014, the potential for fraud and waste of taxpayer dollars has increased as well.

Causey is facing a lot of trouble: years in prison and repayment of the millions she defrauded from the government. But the bigger question still remains, how she was able to commit so much fraud for so long before she was caught – and how many other store owners are running the same kind of schemes?

Just two months ago, I covered this story about three brothers who ran a store in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and fraudulently collected nearly $1.3 million in SNAP benefits. And a few weeks ago, here at HotAir I highlighted reforms out of Maine that are aimed at stopping folks with luxury items such as jet skis and motorhomes and large amounts of assets from continuing to receive SNAP benefits and the all too common problem of EBT cards being traded for illegal drugs.

Clearly waste, fraud, and abuse is happening in the SNAP program and other welfare programs too. Taxpayers deserve to be protected from the exorbitant costs and legislators across the country need to look at proven reforms to stop the scam.

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Kristina Ribali is the Senior Coalitions Director for the Foundation for Government Accountability. Follow her on Twitter or contact her by email at Kristina@thefga.org

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/10/07/massachusetts-woman-pleads-guilty-to-3-6-million-food-stamp-fraud-scheme/feed/513879707Remove work requirements and food stamp enrollment explodes in a SNAPhttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/14/remove-work-requirements-and-food-stamp-enrollment-explodes-in-a-snap/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/14/remove-work-requirements-and-food-stamp-enrollment-explodes-in-a-snap/#commentsTue, 14 Jul 2015 22:01:10 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3869810In 2012, the dependency index increased by 23 percent under the Obama administration. At the time, it meant 67 million Americans were on some sort of federal subsistence program. Of course, Americans who fall on hard times deserve to be caught by some sort of social safety net. As American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Brooks said in May, the social safety net is a triumph of the free enterprise system. It’s a system that creates so much wealth that a portion can be invested in helping the truly destitute. Brooks noted that Ronald Reagan and Friedrich Hayek agreed. But it was never meant to be subjected to the abuse that we’ve seen over the past few years. Started in the 1970s, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) has just become another vehicle for the political left to increase dependency and further their agenda.

In all, there are 48 million Americans on food stamps, up from 17 million since 2000. Additionally, millions more are being added to their states’ respective food stamp rolls than they are finding full-time work; for every one person who found a job, two people are given SNAP benefits. In terms of cost, we were spending $17 billion on food stamps. It’s now ballooned to an $80 billion program.

One of the main causes to the food stamp explosion is the gutting of work requirements. According to federal law, able-bodied adults without dependents need to work at least 20 hours/week or lose benefits after 3 months. In reality, over 40 states have waived such a requirement, according to the Foundation For Government Accountability (FGA). For comparison, in 2006, only six states had such a waiver; it’s now grown to 44.

In 2000, 47 states had asset tests. Federal law states one is eligible if liquid assets are less than $2,000 ($3,250 in homes with disabled or elderly members). Now, asset tests are gone in 35 states, and weakened in five others. It’s to the point where lottery winners and millionaires can be added to food stamp rolls. The removal of the asset test has added 1 million people to the program, with another 4.8 million able-bodied Americans receiving food stamps due to the elimination of work requirements, according to the FGA.

Since the system has fallen victim to fraud and abuse, the FGA is dedicated to pushing state legislatures to re-adopt work requirements, along with asset and income tests, especially for childless, able-bodied adults. Their proposed legislation–the Welfare Fraud Prevention Act–includes an enhanced eligibility test, which includes a quarterly evaluation process. There are other mechanisms, which you can read here. Lastly, dependency isn’t a good agenda for the socioeconomic health of any country, though a socialist might staunchly disagree. Over at the Washington Free Beacon, Ali Meyer reported that at least 45 million Americans have been on food stamps for 48 straight months. More than a few have opted to sell them, which is against the law.

I know it’s a no brainer, but for our liberal friends, once you take away mechanisms that ensure accountability in a government program, it’s going to be abused. In the process, that abuse hurts those who truly need the assistance. Food stamp fraud is nationwide, with incidents reported in South Carolina, Indiana, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/07/14/remove-work-requirements-and-food-stamp-enrollment-explodes-in-a-snap/feed/413869810How much SNAP fraud are we going to find?http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/08/how-much-snap-fraud-are-we-going-to-find/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/08/how-much-snap-fraud-are-we-going-to-find/#commentsMon, 08 Jun 2015 20:01:18 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3865596Apparently it’s government waste, fraud and abuse week here at Hot Air. (Then again, I suppose that’s pretty much every week these days if you’re masochistic enough to keep reading the news.) This time we check in with the the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) which was previously referred to as the food stamps program in various versions. Since we’re well into the 21st century now, using actual, paper stamps or other traceable documents is horse and buggy thinking, so recipients are routinely employing Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards for their purchases. Sadly, as you might expect, if there is a way to exploit new technology somebody will come along and figure out how to do just that.

Larry Benson, writing at Fraud of the Day, dredges up just one such example. A shopkeeper in Ohio was recently charged (not yet convicted) with conspiring with shoppers using SNAP to defraud the government for more than a million dollars.

The Food and Nutrition Service reports that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) paid out more than $74.1 billion in benefits to approximately 46.5 million Americans in 2014. An article posted on Ohio.com states that a small SNAP-approved store owner is accused of defrauding the food stamp program of approximately $1 million.

Prosecutors assert that for more than two-and-a-half years, the small store owner received about $1.5 million in electronically transferred benefits through his company’s bank account. It also says that he allegedly kept a little over $1 million for himself after making a series of small ATM withdrawals.

According to court documents, he carried out the scam by running Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards for a little more than $100 per transaction and gave the customer about half to buy prohibited items including alcoholic beverages and cigarettes. (Under the SNAP program, beneficiaries can use their EBT cards to buy approved items such as bread, milk, cereal, fruits, vegetables and dairy products.)

It seems the owner was caught in a sting when the feds sent in someone undercover to check on him. The rocket scientist in question seems to have gotten a bit greedy after the idea for the alleged scam came to mind and his SNAP sales shot up from $9,000 to $100,000 a month. That would be hard to explain even if every other store in the area had burned to the ground.

Again, these are still allegations at this point and the store owner is innocent until proven guilty. But it sounds like the feds have a pretty strong case or they wouldn’t have moved forward in such a vigorous fashion. Assuming this turns out to be true, there is a larger question to be examined here. We’re talking about one single shop owner in one city. If it’s that easy to scam the system (and clearly it is) then surely this isn’t the only guy who thought of this. And he allegedly got away with a million dollars in just a couple of years. Multiply that out by a couple of shops in every major population center in the country and the numbers could quickly become staggering.

The incentive for abuse clearly exists. Since you are not allowed to use SNAP funds for luxury items such as tobacco and alcohol but those items are desired, the alleged scam set up here is just a no-brainer. Even when paper food stamps were the norm we saw countless incidents of people who were willing to buy them from recipients with cash at roughly fifty cents on the dollar. It’s a great deal for the buyer since they can then effectively buy their groceries at half price. The benefits recipient gets to convert the limited use stamps (albeit at a huge financial loss) into cash so they can purchase whatever they wish. Let’s face it… it’s a system which is almost designed for abuse and the government simply doesn’t have the resources to chase down every single person doing it when the total number of recipients is in the tens of millions.

The real question is, what do you do about it? How does one design a scam proof distribution system when criminals are frequently clever and always working on new and inventive ways to beat the game?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/06/08/how-much-snap-fraud-are-we-going-to-find/feed/483865596Oh, those cruel, Maine Republicanshttp://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/13/oh-those-cruel-maine-republicans/
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/13/oh-those-cruel-maine-republicans/#commentsMon, 13 Apr 2015 22:01:17 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3858891I’m guessing that somebody at the New York Times got bored waiting for Hillary’s YouTube video to drop and figured they’d better find a story about nasty, cruel Republicans crushing the poor and disadvantages before the filing deadline hit. A convenient target popped up in the person of Maine Governor Paul LePage who was in the process of breaking the backs of the disadvantaged with his giant, evil boots. (Hat tip for this story to our friend Jim Geraghty at The Campaign Spot.) The story begins with a heartrending tale of people hanging out at a food pantry waiting to pick up some groceries. We are informed in the most serious of tones that the pantry was originally supposed to be a source of “supplementary” food for the financially disadvantaged, but for many of these folks it was now virtually their only way to fend off starvation. The reason? Governor LePage has cut off their food stamps.

That change is part of an adjustment being made by states that will strip food stamp benefits from a million childless, able-bodied adults ages 18 to 49, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan organization that focuses on low-income Americans.

At its core is a basic question: As the economy improves, should states continue waivers that were enacted during the recession to allow healthy adults who are not working to get food stamps longer than the law’s time limit? Maine is one of the states that say no.

The headlines almost write themselves. Evil Maine Republicans Just Say No To Starving Children.

But, as usual, if you bother to read down the bottom of the article there are some other interesting details. For example, who does the three month time limit for food stamps apply to? It’s the “Abawds.” (Who are actually not an indigenous tribe.)

Last year, the administration of Gov. Paul R. LePage, a Republican, decided to reimpose a three-month limit (out of every three-year period) on food stamps for a group often known as Abawds — able-bodied adults without minor dependents — unless they work 20 hours per week, take state job-training courses or volunteer for about six hours per week. Maine, like other states, makes some exceptions.

“You’ve got to incentivize employment, create goals and create time limits on these welfare programs,” said Mary Mayhew, the commissioner of health and human services in Maine. She said the measure was in line with Mr. LePage’s efforts to reform welfare.

The number of Abawds receiving food stamps in Maine has dropped nearly 80 percent since the rule kicked in, to 2,530 from about 12,000. This time limit is an old one, written into the 1996 federal welfare law. But, during the recession, most states took advantage of a provision that allows them to waive it when unemployment is persistently high, which meant poor adults could stay on the program regardless of their work status.

So these cruel cuts – which still allow you to collect food stamps for three months with absolutely no questions asked – can only apply to people with no physical impediment preventing them from working. They also can’t have any children. And they can’t be older than 49. If they fall into any of those categories there is no cessation of benefits.

But even then there’s a loophole. Even if you fit all three categories, you can take any part time job for 20 hours a week and re-qualify. Can’t find a part time job? You can sign up for a free state job-training course. And if even that is too much trouble for you, you can take your healthy body out for a walk and volunteer for six hours per week. Six hours. For someone with no job and no children to look after. And your benefits are immediately restored.

Boy howdy, that’s some real hardship there, isn’t it? Assuming you are out there in good faith looking for work, six hours of volunteering still leaves you 34 hours per week to apply for jobs during normal working hours. That Paul LePage is certainly in the same category with Sauron sitting in his tower in Mordor, eh?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2015/04/13/oh-those-cruel-maine-republicans/feed/623858891States are using a loophole to negate Congress’s food-stamp savingshttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/27/states-are-using-a-loophole-to-negate-congresss-food-stamp-savings/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/27/states-are-using-a-loophole-to-negate-congresss-food-stamp-savings/#commentsThu, 27 Mar 2014 18:41:24 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=302362Earlier this year and after quite the drawn-out kerfuffle, both chambers of Congress finally managed to agree to move beyond the stopgap legislative maneuvering they’d been using in place of a long-term farm bill — and despite making very few and really only cosmetic changes to the shameless corporate welfare that is agricultural portion of the legislation, House Republicans and Senate Democrats settled on cutting the federal food stamp program’s almost $80 billion/year budget by a total amounting to one percent. Republicans had originally been looking for something more along the lines of a five percent budget cut, seeing as how the program’s enrollment went from about 34 million in 2009 to more than 47 million in 2013. Even though Democrats keep informing us that the recession is over, the economy is rebounding, and employment has genuinely improved, they loudly insisted that five percent in budget savings more or less amounted to a spitefully inflicted human rights violation. They still weren’t happy about the one percent cut, mind you — citing it as an example of Republicans’ allegedly perverse penchant for watching people starve, rather than their actual desire to pare down our tremendous national debt and metastasizing government and welfare state in an effort to grow the economy back to health — but Democrats went along begrudgingly.

Governors in several states are using a loophole in the farm bill to restore food aid for thousands of low-income families, potentially wiping out billions of dollars in savings Congress agreed to last month. …

The loophole concerns a provision, known as “Heat and Eat,” that allows people to get added food stamp benefits if they also qualify for a program that helps pay heating costs for the poor.

To qualify, people previously needed to get as little as $1 in heating aid. Several states provided that amount so residents could get more food stamp benefits. Congress sought to curb the practice – and save $8.5 billion – by raising the minimum requirement to $20.

Governors in eight states have responded by simply giving people another $19 to qualify for the extra food stamp benefits. …

“Clearly, Congress intended to grant states the authority to provide this vital benefit which is a lifeline to some of our most vulnerable constituents,” Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy (D) wrote in an angry letter [pdf] to Boehner.

The Democratic governors of Montana, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island and Vermont, as well as Republican Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania, have all moved forward, and it looks like the governors of Washington, California, Maine, Michigan, New Jersey, and Wisconsin might be joining up soon — with most of the money coming from federal blocks from which a lot of states end up with extra money at the end of the year. I suppose it is these states’ prerogative to use that cash how they please, and you can bet that they’ll happily hammer away at those starvation-loving Republicans while they’re at it (elections, you know) — but this is a great example of how big government, once grown, is almost impossible to trim back.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/03/27/states-are-using-a-loophole-to-negate-congresss-food-stamp-savings/feed/44302362Dems to Secretary Vilsack: Could we get a delay on the new cuts to food stamps?http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/17/dems-to-secretary-vilsack-you-dont-suppose-you-could-just-delay-the-new-cuts-to-food-stamps-could-you/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/17/dems-to-secretary-vilsack-you-dont-suppose-you-could-just-delay-the-new-cuts-to-food-stamps-could-you/#commentsMon, 17 Feb 2014 20:21:57 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=297702Well, heck — while they’re on a gigantic running-around-Congress tear anyway, why not delay effects of the law that Congress just passed and President Obama just signed two weeks ago? Via the NYDN:

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and 71 other congressional Democrats are asking the agriculture secretary to delay a new law cutting food stamps for hundreds of thousands of Americans.

“Our states need time to adjust their policies to accommodate this drastic cut and roll out the changes seamlessly,” the lawmakers say in a letter they plan to send Tuesday to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.

Gillibrand lined up the lawmakers to sign off on the letter, which asks Vilsack to delay until next fall a provision in the massive farm bill Congress passed this month that cuts $8 billion in food stamp aid.

That $8 billion spending cut, by the way, is going to come over ten years and amounts to a barely one percent reduction to the federal food stamp program’s budget, and according to the farm bill, the USDA is supposed to start phasing them in next month. These Democrats, evidently, are having difficulty abiding by that “drastic” cut for the sake of our national budget, despite the noticeably absent “stimulus” effect Secretary Vilsack once promised would result from the tens of millions more Americans added to the food-stamp rolls during President Obama’s tenure.

Which, funnily enough, seems to have a lot in common with the other “stimulus” effects we were promised would push the economy toward “recovery.” Five years later, how is it possible that so many Democrats like Gillibrand are simultaneously arguing that President Obama’s spending endeavors have helped add jobs and wealth to the economy, but that anything less than maintaining the recently-enlarged food-stamp status quo is flat-out unacceptable? Does that seem at all inconsistent to anyone else? Via the WSJ:

Democrats and Republicans used the five-year anniversary of the 2009 stimulus law to debate the measure’s effectiveness, a feud that highlights how the deep divisions over the connection between federal spending and economic growth continue to challenge policy makers. …

The White House on Monday released a 70-page report that said the law “created or saved an average of 1.6 million jobs a year for four years,” and raised the country’s gross domestic product by between 2% and 3% from late 2009 through mid-2011. …

On one of the most polarizing points, the White House in its report said the law “had at most a minimal impact on the long-run debt,” arguing that the economic growth caused by the law offset or “eliminated” the costs. …

“If you recall five years ago, the notion was that if the government spent all this money—that, by the way, was borrowed—that somehow the economy would begin to grow and create jobs,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), in a video message released Monday morning. “Well, of course, it clearly failed.”

You can say that again.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/17/dems-to-secretary-vilsack-you-dont-suppose-you-could-just-delay-the-new-cuts-to-food-stamps-could-you/feed/56297702NYC Democrat: Let’s get real here, Republicans are only interested in cutting food stamps because they “just want people to starve”http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/12/nyc-democrat-lets-get-real-here-republicans-are-only-interested-in-cutting-food-stamps-because-they-just-want-people-to-starve/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/12/nyc-democrat-lets-get-real-here-republicans-are-only-interested-in-cutting-food-stamps-because-they-just-want-people-to-starve/#commentsWed, 12 Feb 2014 18:21:11 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=297134The farm bill passed through the House two weeks ago with a vote of 251 yeas to 166 nays, with the nays composed of a slim majority of the Democratic coalition — and at least one of the opposing Democrats’ thought process on the matter went a little something like this, via CNS News:

I voted against the farm bill essentially because it contains $8 billion in cuts to the food stamp program. … That’s just immoral, frankly. I don’t see how we can do that. Not in this recession, where people can’t find jobs, we’re not extending unemployment insurance, and now we want to starve people? That’s wrong. … Any program, humans beings will find a way to have some fraud. We have plenty of protections to minimize the fraud. If Republicans wanted to say, let’s put in this extra protection, that extra protection, that would be something else. They’re just using that as an excuse. They just want people to starve, and it’s disgusting.

There you have it: The either/or moral choice between more food stamps, or more starvation. That’s it. Those are literally your only two options. Thank you, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, for putting things in such stark, intellectually bankrupt, and demagogic terms.

If Rep. Nadler and some of his fellow Democrats did care to tread a more honest path, he might mention that that $8 billion food-stamp cut is the grand-total reduction over a period of ten years, and that it amounts to a whopping one percent cut to a program whose enrollment has doubled since 2006 alone. I mean, can he hear himself? “In this recession, where people can’t find jobs”? …Right, and perhaps our now sustained pattern of metastasized federal spending and top-down market intervention is precisely the thing that’s keeping this “recovery” from gaining any steam. It couldn’t be that Republicans want to help people keep more of their own money and allow the economy to grow and create jobs from the bottom-up by reducing our snowballing debt-to-GDP ratio, could it? Instead of, you know, just unquestionably raising spending at every possible turn and counting on the “food stamps as stimulus“-effect that has so far miraculously failed to materialize?

I might also point out that, according to Rep. Nadler, the at least $750 million or so the USDA estimates in recent annual food-stamp fraud is just your average, run-of-the-mill, trivial level of inherent government waste, but the $800 million a year that will get cut out of the $75 billion+ program in the new bill is calamitous and downright “disgusting.” Odd disparity, that.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/12/nyc-democrat-lets-get-real-here-republicans-are-only-interested-in-cutting-food-stamps-because-they-just-want-people-to-starve/feed/89297134Ugh: Senate approves farm bill, onward to Obama for signinghttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/04/ugh-senate-approves-farm-bill-onward-to-obama-for-signing/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/04/ugh-senate-approves-farm-bill-onward-to-obama-for-signing/#commentsWed, 05 Feb 2014 01:41:40 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=296171We knew this calamity was coming, but I suppose I should make a note of it — if only to once again highlight the mind-numbing amount of corporate pork and top-down market manipulation that Congress just united to preserve with a casual $1 trillion legislative leviathan with more special-interest carve-outs than you can shake a stick at. Because, bipartisanship. Oh, rapture!

The Senate on Tuesday passed the long-awaited farm bill, ending two years of partisan rancor and stalled negotiations and clearing what is expected to be the last hurdle for the nearly $1 trillion spending measure.

The bill was passed with strong bipartisan support, 68 to 32. The legislation now heads to the desk of President Obama, who is expected to sign it.

“Many people said this would never happen in this environment, but Congress has come together to pass a major bipartisan jobs bill,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan and chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. “This effort proves that by working across party lines, we can save taxpayer money and create smart policies that lay the foundation for a stronger economy.”

The current farm bill was supposed to save money. Its backers in Congress are touting the fact that the legislation cuts $16.5 billion from the deficit over the next decade, compared with simply extending previous law.

But that’s a relatively small trim compared with other proposals. In its 2014 budget, for instance, the White House had asked for farm legislation that would have saved twice as much, $38 billion — mainly by slashing payouts to farmers.

What’s more, as Ryan Alexander of Taxpayers for Common Sense laments, no one’s sure that those projected savings will even materialize: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that two-thirds of the deficit reduction won’t happen until after 2019 — after this bill expires — and that depends on economic assumptions that may not pan out. About the only guaranteed cut here is the $8.4 billion snip to food stamps.

And that $8.4 billion snip to food stamps? That’s over ten years, which amounts to just about one percent of the program’s total budget. SNAP’s budget has more than doubled since 2008, partially because of what Obama assured us were his economic “stimulus” efforts back in 2009; the White House and the Democrats are now fervently insisting that the economy has been steadily ‘recovering’ throughout Obama’s tenure, but for some odd reason, anything other than a total preservation of these heightened SNAP spending levels is a travesty against humanity and a sure sign that Republicans loathe poor people. I’m so confused.

Anyway. President Obama will seal the deal on Friday, taking the opportunity to offer what I’m sure will be some very delightful remarks about how the legislation will “reduce our deficits” (no, not really at all), “provide assistance for farmers when they need it most” (read: wealthy corporate agribusiness and their well-organized lobbies), and “spur the development of renewable energy” (because we evidently don’t provide biofuels producers with enough avenues for rent-seeking already). Sweet.

“Obama will deliver remarks at Michigan State University on the importance of the Farm Bill to America’s economy,” the White House said in a statement. …

“This bill provides certainty to America’s farmers and ranchers, and contains a variety of commonsense reforms that my Administration has consistently called for, including reforming and eliminating direct farm subsidies and providing assistance for farmers when they need it most,” said Obama.

“It will continue reducing our deficits without gutting the vital assistance programs millions of hardworking Americans count on to help put food on the table for their families,” he added. “And it will support conservation of valuable lands, spur the development of renewable energy, and incentivize healthier nutrition for all Americans.”

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/04/ugh-senate-approves-farm-bill-onward-to-obama-for-signing/feed/28296171Senate ready to pass the farm bill and all of its non-“improvements” this weekhttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/03/senate-ready-to-pass-the-farm-bill-and-all-of-its-non-improvements-this-week/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/03/senate-ready-to-pass-the-farm-bill-and-all-of-its-non-improvements-this-week/#commentsMon, 03 Feb 2014 20:21:35 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=295950So much pork.]]>The Senate is voting on the massive, pork-filled, $1-trillion crapburger we glibly refer to as the “farm bill” this week, and they’re likely going to green-light the powerful legislative monstrosity as the dictates of agricultural and food-stamp policy for at least the next five years. The House has already approved the thing, which means the next stop after the Senate’s vote will be President Obama’s desk — an occasion on which, no doubt, he and many members of the media will surely tout the oh-so-wonderful ‘achievements’ of which Congress is capable if only they would come together in such a comfortingly bipartisan manner more often.

In recognition of this extra-special brand of “bipartisanship,” let’s go ahead and take a sampling of some of the legislation’s more delightful highlights. For instance, the proposed requirement that members of Congress disclose how much they personally are benefiting from the subsidies contained in the farm bill? …Well, actually, that got eliminated:

A provision requiring members of Congress and the administration to disclose what crop insurance subsidies they receive was quietly dropped from the farm bill that the House passed on Wednesday.

Section 11001 of the House-passed farm bill had a provision that “requires disclosure (by name) of the amount of crop insurance assistance received by Members of Congress, Cabinet Secretaries, and members of their immediate families.”

That provision was taken out in closed-door conference negotiations before the bill was released on Monday. The bill cleared the House in less than 72 hours, before many lawmakers had a chance to review it, and now heads to the Senate.

Also not included in the conference report is a provision that would have reversed the move of catfish inspections out of the Food and Drug Administration and into the Agriculture Department’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Cochran had made it his personal mission to eliminate that provision, which was contained in the House bill but not the Senate bill, on behalf of the many domestic catfish producers in his state.

After more than $30 million in startup expenses, the USDA has yet to inspect a single catfish — and has actually disbanded the four-member catfish inspection program it created, proponents of the change had argued.

Certain environmentalist groups, however, are none too pleased about the whole thing.

The Environmental Working Group said Friday that it is opposed to the $956 billion farm bill heading for a vote in the Senate on Monday.

The group said that while the bill makes some positive changes that will foster better environmental stewardship, it could significantly increase farm subsidies and encourage the kind of overproduction that has devastated natural areas in the past. …

“But those important provisions are outweighed by new, expanded and largely unlimited subsidies that do too much to help the largest and most successful farm operations at the expense of family farmers and the environment,” he added.

The group said that will traditional farm subsidies like direct payments are eliminated in the farm bill, new price and revenue-based supports will “almost certainly” cost more than expected. This could more than erase the $14.3 billion in cuts in the bill to subsidies.

While Big Agriculture is basically OK with it, because they’ll get new types of crop-insurance programs to more or less replace the elimination of direct payouts that lawmakers are hailing as a major source of savings. Big Corn and other biofuels producers, specifically, are pretty jazzed about the inclusion of biofuels supports that were removed from the original House version of the bill (because the Renewable Fuel Standard evidently just isn’t enough):

In Washington, the US Senate and House of Representatives, in a joint conference report, reached a compromise that cleared way for passage of a 5-year Farm Bill including $881 million in mandatory funding for Energy Title programs including eligibility to renewable chemicals under the Section 9003 Biorefinery Assistance Program and Section 9007 Biomass Research and Development Program, and support for new purpose grown energy crops. …

The Biomass Crop Assistance Program partners with hundreds of farmers across the country to develop sustainable new biofuels and other products from non-food crops, providing farmers with additional farm income and producing next-generation energy sources. The program currently supports more than 1,100 American growers in 188 counties across 12 states, who are converting 53,000 underutilized acres to energy crops. …

Among the Farm Bill policy changes was the expansion of the Biorefinery Assistance Program. With these amendments, companies seeking to produce high-performance renewable chemicals and biobased products in the US are eligible for loan guarantees to build manufacturing plants.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of fuel, here another extension of what is effectively another fuel tax:

Congress’ mammoth farm bill restores the imposition of an extra fee on home heating oil, hitting consumers in cold-weather states just as utility costs are spiking.

The fee — two-tenths of a cent on every gallon sold — was tacked on to the end of the 959-page bill, which is winding its way through Capitol Hill. The fee would last for nearly 20 years and would siphon the money to develop equipment that is cheaper, more efficient and safer, and to encourage consumers to update their equipment.

It’s just one of dozens of provisions tucked into the farm bill… Taxpayer groups say the bill could increase spending over the previous version and that it’s crammed with favors for individual lawmakers, such as rules legalizing industrial hemp. …

“The National Oilheat Research Alliance (NORA) has long benefitted low- and middle-class families and small businesses throughout the Northeast and other cold weather states,” Rep. Leonard Lance, New Jersey Republican, said in a statement. “The program improves energy efficiency and lowers heating bills at no cost to the U.S. taxpayer.”

The bill prohibits oil companies from passing the fee on to consumers, but taxpayer advocates said that’s a sham and that the money has to come from consumers.

Not to mention, the dozens of weird little policy provisions you’d never begin to think of thrown in to help grab lawmakers’ support from various regions. Here are some of the ideas for which New York Democrat Chuck Schumer lobbied, like preserving the “wool trust fund.” Yes, that is a thing that exists.

“This gives U.S. wool and fabric manufacturers like Hickey Freeman in Rochester a partial tax refund of duties paid on imports to wool,” said Schumer, who lobbied Senate negotiators to keep the provision in the final agreement.

Imported woolen suits have low tariffs, but imported wool used to make suits in the U.S. have high tariffs.

“So it gave an advantage to foreign clothing makers, particularly in the fine woolen end,” Schumer said.

The Maple Tap Act, another Schumer initiative. It would create a $20 million annual grant program for research and expansion of the maple syrup industry nationally. Schumer predicted some of the research will be conducted by Cornell University.

“This program is going to unleash the untapped potential of New York maple because, after all, the sugar maple is our state tree,” Schumer said.

So… remind me again why the passing this trillion-dollar, gigantically opaque, special-interest-serving, 1,000-page onmnibus behemoth is ostensibly a cheering act of bipartisanship? To finish, go read Kim Strassel’s roundup of the farm bill’s multitudinous deficiencies over at the WSJ. It is pure poetry, and it hurts so good.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/03/senate-ready-to-pass-the-farm-bill-and-all-of-its-non-improvements-this-week/feed/17295950The House passes the “updated” farm bill, with zero dramahttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/29/the-house-passes-the-updated-farm-bill-with-zero-drama/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/29/the-house-passes-the-updated-farm-bill-with-zero-drama/#commentsWed, 29 Jan 2014 21:01:04 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=295387For all of the to-do in Congress last year about finally separating out the food-stamp and agricultural-subsidy components that make up the omnibus disaster that is the federal “farm bill,” the version on which the House and Senate conferees have since been laboring (with the persistent and irate input of just about every food- and agriculture-based lobby under the sun) sailed through the House this morning with very little legislative fanfare. Neither the GOP nor the Democrats decided to make a stink about it this time, probably preferring to get into another fight over it during this phase of delicate pre-midterms politics, via Politico:

Given up for dead just months ago, a new five-year farm bill cleared the House Wednesday morning, raising hopes that Congress can send it on to President Barack Obama no later than next week.

Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow wants to complete Senate debate before next Wednesday, and the strength of the 251-166 House vote could mean the Michigan Democrat will meet her goal even sooner.

Filling hundreds of pages, the giant measure combines a landmark rewrite of commodity programs together with bipartisan reforms and savings from food stamps. It caps years of struggle spanning two Congresses, a political saga largely ignored by the national press and White House but one that fractured the old farm and food coalition as never before.

Given this history, the breadth of support Wednesday was all the more striking. Republicans, including Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), backed the measure 162-63. A narrow majority of Democrats opposed the bill, but among the 89 who backed the measure were the party’s very top leaders, including Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D- Calif.), Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Rep. James Clyburn (D-S.C), the assistant Democratic leader.

The total ten-year cost is pegged at more than $950 billion, and while the legislation’s apologists are congratulating themselves on the reduction in food-stamp spending (…by one percent, to a program whose enrollment has nearly doubled in just the past five years) and the almost-elimination of direct payments to farmers (…which is partially balanced out by the increases to the federal crop-insurance program), this is in essence still just a recently metastasized welfare program couple with a couple hundred billion dollars in market-busting corporate pork for large agribusinesses. MSMers are hailing the development as Congress “finally coming together and getting something done,” but… I would interpret this as pretty much an enforcement of the status quo and just about the opposite of “getting something done.”

I have a hard time seeing the Senate raising any kind of ruckus over the legislation when the House is already on board, so meet your new agricultural policy for at least the next five years, America — which is more or less the same as the old agricultural policy.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/29/the-house-passes-the-updated-farm-bill-with-zero-drama/feed/18295387The “cuts” in the new-and-improved farm bill… aren’t, really.http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/27/the-cuts-in-the-new-and-improved-farm-bill-arent-really/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/27/the-cuts-in-the-new-and-improved-farm-bill-arent-really/#commentsTue, 28 Jan 2014 00:21:47 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=295106The House GOP was originally looking for around a 5 percent cut to the almost $80 billion/year federal food-stamp program in the latest iteration of the long-overdue farm bill. The Senate Democrats were appalled by such — uhm — “excess,” preferring an obviously much more responsible cut of half of one percent. This, evidently, is what compromise looks like:

A House plan to make major cuts to food stamps would be scaled back under a bipartisan agreement on a massive farm bill, a near end to a more than two-year fight that has threatened to hurt rural lawmakers in an election year.

The measure announced Monday by the House and Senate Agriculture committees preserves food stamp benefits for most Americans who receive them and continues generous subsidies for farmers. The House could vote on the bill as soon as Wednesday.

The compromise was expected to cut food stamps by about $800 million a year, or around 1 percent. …

The final bill released Monday would cost almost $100 billion a year over five years, with a cut of around $2.3 billion a year from current spending.

A $2 billion cut in spending (whoop-de-doo) from our absolutely current spending levels, perhaps, but it wasn’t so very long ago that we were spending drastically less than that on the omnibus whopper that is the farm bill’s marriage of political convenience between food stamps and agriculture subsides. 2008, in fact. Chris Edwards at Cato explains:

It looks like the final farm bill will be expected to cost about $950 billion over 10 years. CRS has details on bill versions from the Fall, but I adjusted those numbers based on the reported GOP cave-in on food stamps.

If the final number is $950 billion, the 2014 farm bill will cost 48 percent more than the $640 billion farm bill passed in 2008. Farm bill supporters claim that the new bill includes “savings” and “cuts,” but that is a myth created by the rising CBO baseline. The reality is that Congress is set to impose a huge, damaging, and unaffordable burden on taxpayers and the economy.

Even though the Congressional conferees are finally inking their “compromise,” however, the rest of the week will likely determine whether or not it finally makes a peaceful and uncontested journey through both chambers of Congress, or if Democrats and/or Republicans decide to raise another legislative ruckus (just look at Politico‘s report on the afternoon’s development for an idea of the absurdly complex degree to which various agriculture lobbies are frantically tightening their cronyish, rent-seeking grips on maintaining even the marginal cuts to their precious subsidies that the conferees’ version managed to make). If any Republicans do make some noise over the (pitifully small) cuts to the ever-burgeoning food-stamp program, you can count on Democrats to fully exploit it as another opportunity to tout their favored populist messaging, but I would riddle the Democrats this: In what world is this a sign of an economic “recovery”?

In a first, working-age people now make up the majority in U.S. households that rely on food stamps — a switch from a few years ago, when children and the elderly were the main recipients.

Some of the change is due to demographics, such as the trend toward having fewer children. But a slow economic recovery with high unemployment, stagnant wages and an increasing gulf between low-wage and high-skill jobs also plays a big role. It suggests that government spending on the $80 billion-a-year food stamp program — twice what it cost five years ago — may not subside significantly anytime soon.

Food stamp participation since 1980 has grown the fastest among workers with some college training, a sign that the safety net has stretched further to cover America’s former middle class, according to an analysis of government data for The Associated Press by economists at the University of Kentucky. Formally called Supplemental Nutrition Assistance, or SNAP, the program now covers 1 in 7 Americans.

Answer: It isn’t, and Democrats’ big-spending, big-government policies are not succeeding in helping provide Americans with the opportunities to lift themselves out of poverty, nor in generating the real level of economic growth necessary for them to do so.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/27/the-cuts-in-the-new-and-improved-farm-bill-arent-really/feed/12295106USDA: Record 20 percent of American households used food stamps in 2013http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/22/usda-record-20-percent-of-american-households-used-food-stamps-in-2013/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/22/usda-record-20-percent-of-american-households-used-food-stamps-in-2013/#commentsWed, 22 Jan 2014 19:01:52 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=294457The Obama administration has an unfortunately deliberate penchant for talking out of both sides of its mouth when it comes to touting the slow-going economic “recovery” through which they have been leading the country for the past five years; on the one hand, they insist, the private sector is creating jobs, we’re making steady economic gains, and things are definitely improving. On the other, however, there’s “still more work to be done,” and despite the manifold economic improvements, they assert that the further expansion of entitlement programs like unemployment benefits and food stamps are an absolute necessity to keeping their “recovery” going — and on the latter especially, the Obama administration has been particularly aggressive. CNS News reports that, even in the first year of President Obama’s second term, the federal food-stamp program continued to grow, with a record 20 percent of American households and a record number of individuals participated in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — and that the program itself reached its record-high budget.

The USDA says that there were 23,052,388 households on food stamps in the average month of fiscal 2013, an increase of 722,675 from fiscal year 2012, when there were 22,329,713 households on food stamps in the average month. …

In 2013, the monthly average for individuals on food stamps hit an all-time-high of 47,636,084, according to the USDA, an increase of 1,027,012 over the 46,609,072 individuals who were participating in the program in 2012. …

For fiscal year 2013, the SNAP program cost $79,641,880,000, which is a 164% increase over the past decade. When adjusted for inflation, the cost of the SNAP program was $30,153,090,000 in fiscal year 2003.

Why, exactly, is it a victory of our economic “recovery” to vastly grow a program designed to temporarily help Americans in need of economic assistance, and why exactly is the program failing to add all the “economic stimulus” the administration promised it would? The version of the farm bill on which lawmakers are currently conferring has sought out a compromise-cut to the almost $80 billion annual program in the form of $9 billion over ten years, but no doubt Democrats will object to even that relatively small budgetary reduction by clobbering Republicans over the head with “draconian”-style demagoguery — rather than asking themselves why it is the continual expansion of the program seems to be so necessary in the midst of the Obama “recovery.”

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/22/usda-record-20-percent-of-american-households-used-food-stamps-in-2013/feed/64294457Farm bill: Conferees reach a food-stamp agreement while milk, catfish gum up the workshttp://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/09/farm-bill-conferees-reach-a-food-stamp-agreement-while-milk-catfish-gum-up-the-works/
http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/09/farm-bill-conferees-reach-a-food-stamp-agreement-while-milk-catfish-gum-up-the-works/#commentsThu, 09 Jan 2014 21:01:39 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=292884Congress had hoped to wrap up a five- or ten-year agreement on the fate of the farm bill last summer, well before its now-expired deadline at the start of the new year, but contention over the price tag of the federal food-stamp program — in which total enrollment has grown by more than seventy percent in the past five years alone, by the way — meant that consensus just wasn’t in the cards at the time.

The Democrat-controlled Senate was gunning for a version that cut the program by a mere $400 million annually, while the House was looking for something along the lines of between a $2 billion to a $4 billion annual cut — a range with which the White House was most definitively not on board. The lawmakers currently conferring on a version amenable to both chambers have found a number that they hope will appease both, but in the meantime, there are other and agricultural-related pieces of corporate pork kicking up their own dust. Via the NYT:

Lawmakers working on a new farm bill appear to have reached an agreement on cuts to the food stamp program, which had been the most contentious issue in efforts to pass the legislation. But disagreements over a program to help dairy producers when milk prices drop and over a catfish inspection office at the Agriculture Department have emerged as major sticking points in the negotiations, which were expected to be wrapped up this week, according to people briefed on the talks.

Those people said on Thursday that a deal had been reached to cut about $9 billion over 10 years from the food stamp program, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The cuts are more than twice the $4 billion approved by the Democratic-led Senate in May, but far less than the nearly $40 billion in cuts passed by the Republican-controlled House in its bill. …

The [dairy] program, which limits dairy supplies to help bolster the price of milk, is generally opposed by conservatives. Mr. Boehner and Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, called it a “Soviet style” government bureaucracy that distorts the market.

Both the catfish and dairy programs are just different forms of protectionism for highly niche interests: The $20 million catfish inspection program is essentially a trade barrier to protect domestic catfish producers, mostly in the South, from foreign competition (and it has yet to actually start inspecting catfish), and the highly regulated and subsidized dairy market is basically a federally-sponsored racket that deters innovation and competition and helps to keep dairy prices high. Both can easily stand to be eliminated, but special interests rarely if ever go gently into that good night, and lawmakers fond of the status quo aren’t keen on the accompanying fuss. Via Politico:

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas conceded Thursday that final action on a farm bill conference report is now likely to slip into late January — a major blow to himself and an ominous turn for the bill itself.

“It needs to be done as soon as possible but the issues are of such magnitude I can’t go until I get the issues addressed,” Lucas said. The Oklahoma Republican admitted to immense frustration — and some surprise — at the full dimensions of the standoff now between Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Lucas’s own ranking Democrat, Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, over dairy policy.

“I don’t know that I understood how just hard the positions were by the two interested parties,” Lucas said in a hallway interview. “No one has shown any flexibility whatsoever.”

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2014/01/09/farm-bill-conferees-reach-a-food-stamp-agreement-while-milk-catfish-gum-up-the-works/feed/48292884Yeah, a farm bill probably isn’t happening this yearhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/10/yeah-a-farm-bill-probably-isnt-happening-this-year/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/10/yeah-a-farm-bill-probably-isnt-happening-this-year/#commentsTue, 10 Dec 2013 18:01:43 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=289958For all of the year’s high legislative drama over and high electoral hopes for finally getting a non-stopgap version of a farm bill — that longstanding marriage of convenience between our explosively growing food-stamp program and our less expensive but much more egregious crop of corporate pork known as our agricultural policy — passed, it now looks like the whole thing just ain’t gonna’ happen this year. Despite the agribusiness lobbying pressure coming in from all sides, the House and Senate conferees have yet to nail down a version that would be amenable to both of their respective legislative bodies, and with 2013’s last session just about done, they’re probably pushing the issue into next year. Again.

To buy more time for farm bill talks, the House is expected to take up this week a short-term extension of current law through January.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has already signaled he is open to this option and a vote could come as early as Wednesday on the suspension calendar.

This is the second such extension Congress has been forced to take up since the 2008 farm bill expired almost 15 months ago. But the circumstances now are very different.

Last year at this time, the House had yet to even act on a farm bill and a long-term extension was needed through this past September. The legislative process is much farther along now—albeit still tortured. And there is a genuine hope that a House-Senate conference can report a farm bill back for final action in January.

True that the farm bill is this time much “farther along” (if that’s how you want to look at it) in terms of the legislative deliberations — but I don’t know that anything’s changed that will make the vote any less screechingly contentious, what with the draconian five percent cut to the food-stamp budget Republicans have proposed and the Democrats’ subsequent commitment to beating them around the heads with the intellectually cheap demagoguery stick for it.

The absurdity of our agricultural policy, by the way, is aptly demonstrated by the very reason Congress is going to tack on a one-month extension of the current policy rather than letting it expire on schedule. Without new legislation in place before New Year’s, we’ll slip back into complex and entirely antiquated price supports that will distort a whole bunch of food prices — a phenomenon generally known as the Dairy Cliff:

Chris Galen, vice president of the National Milk Producers Federation, estimated that dairy products alone could go up 40% to 50%, explaining that the price changes would not happen right away, but could send milk toward $7 or $8 per gallon. “It would be a noticeable increase,” Galen said.

But it’s not just dairy prices that could skyrocket if the House and Senate fail to agree to new Farm Bill or at least extend the current legislation that is set to expire on January 1st. From dairy to wheat to rice, corn, barley, oats and honey, some of the most ubiquitous crops in the United States would revert back to artificial price supports that Congress first created at the end of the Great Depression and made permanent in 1949. …

“It would wreak havoc on the entire agriculture industry and the consumer food market,” says Ben Becker, the spokesman for the Senate Agriculture Committee. “That’s a major reason why we need to get a new Farm Bill done.”

Or, I might suggest that it could be an argument for why the farm bill needs to just Do Less, no? Anyone?

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/10/yeah-a-farm-bill-probably-isnt-happening-this-year/feed/24289958Farm bill talks still stalled out as the clock winds downhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/02/farm-bill-talks-still-stalled-out-as-the-clock-winds-down/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/12/02/farm-bill-talks-still-stalled-out-as-the-clock-winds-down/#commentsMon, 02 Dec 2013 18:21:52 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=289037The House and Senate are only in session at the same time for a grand total of five days before the Christmas holiday hits, and there are still several big-ticket items lingering on the potential Congressional docket. Among them: A defense authorization bill; the big budget deal on which Paul Ryan and Patty Murray are working; and of course, that behemoth of corporate pork so very important to the special interests in flyover country, the so-called farm bill.

The country is currently operating on a temporary extension of the combined agricultural and food-stamp policy legislation, and passing another multi-year package has been going through fits and starts of varying degrees of legislative drama over the past six months, without any major breakthroughs. The bill’s conferees (Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., ranking member Thad Cochran, R-Miss., House Agriculture Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., ranking member Collin Peterson, D-Minn.) failed to meet their goal of reaching a framework for a conference report before Thanksgiving, and even with phone calls and meetings happening over the break, it doesn’t sound like there’s been much definite progress — as much as they actually do want to get something passed rather than reverting to yet another extension, via National Journal:

But they did meet three times last week and have talked on the phone several times since. The Senate is not in session this week, but all conferees have been told they may be summoned to Washington for an open conference meeting on the bill on Wednesday. A Cochran spokesman said that whether the meeting takes place this week or not, “The principals continue to talk and are having substantive discussions. They all hope to come up with a plan that is workable for all parts of the country.” …

One congressional aide working on the bill reacted in stronger terms. Even though the principal negotiators didn’t get the framework, “it’s not like everyone is angry with each other and not talking anymore. Who wants to talk about a two-year extension when we are this close to getting a farm bill done? It beats anything I’ve ever seen.” …

The principal negotiators and the Agriculture Department have warned that if a new bill is not signed by Dec. 31, the USDA will have to start using the 1949 dairy program and that would result in higher milk prices. But in an interview, Hoeven acknowledged that many legislators consider Jan. 15, the date when the current continuing resolution funding the government runs out, to be the real deadline for a budget deal, for an appropriations bill for the rest of fiscal 2014, and for the farm bill. But he said he worries that leaving the farm bill till January could mean that it gets too mixed up with other legislation. He also noted that as the year moves along, the bill would be subject to rescoring, which could complicate its completion.

There’s still some discussion over certain of the agricultural-policy measures, but the big sticking point that will draw the most attention (as ever) is going to be food stamps and the oh-so-draconian five percent cut House Republicans have proposed to the metastasized federal program. Via the WSJ:

If the farm bill stalls again this year, both parties will try to paint the other as responsible for the failure. The dynamic could influence a range of 2014 races in both the House and Senate, including in Montana, where the issue helped Democratic Sen. Jon Tester retain his seat last year. In Iowa, the farm bill is so important that Democratic Rep. Bruce Braley, running for an open Senate seat, broke from most in his party to join Republicans in supporting the House’s first, failed attempt to pass a farm bill in June.

“This is going to be a very significant issue,” said Rep. Steve Israel (D., N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which oversees House races for the party. He signaled that Democrats would accuse Republicans of politicizing what had traditionally been a bipartisan bill, in part by demanding big cuts to food stamps. “It fits into the overall theme of a reckless, Republican Congress that injects partisanship and ideology into issues that had always been bipartisan,” he said.

Some conservatives, by contrast, say that lawmakers will be rewarded if they reject a farm bill that spends too much money or ends up resembling “corporate welfare” for farmers. “It’s an opportunity for them to say Washington is not in the business of handing things out to people,” said Dan Holler, spokesman for Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

It won’t be nearly as important a campaign issue as ObamaCare, for instance, or any other number of issues, but it’s still a big deal in a lot of more rural districts, and both parties will be looking to take advantage of it, especially is Congress does end up going for yet another extension.

The Many Police Department posted this week on its Facebook page: “Apparently after reviewing surveillance tapes and interviewing witnesses, Wal-Mart has no evidence of any theft, nor any other criminal activity during the October 12th disturbance at the store. With this information, the Many Police Department has closed the investigation at this time.”

The Louisiana governor’s office said Wednesday night that it would strip food stamp benefits from anyone who took advantage of an EBT card malfunction that in some cases caused an all-out shopping frenzy in some stores across the state, The Advocate reported.

It is unclear how many recipients stand in line to lose benefits for a year, but more than 12,000 received an insufficient funds notice when the EBT card system was corrected on Oct.12, the report said.

“We must protect the program for those who receive and use their benefits appropriately according to the law. We are looking at each case individually, addressing those recipients who are suspected of misrepresenting their eligibility for benefits or defrauding the system,” Suzy Sonnier, the secretary of state at the Department of Children and Family Services, said in a statement.

Not only were people who were eligible for the EBT programs taking more in food than they had in their accounts, but at least some people who weren’t even eligible for the programs were using expired EBT cards to get in on the frenzy.

(Springhill police chief Will) Lynd says at 9 p.m., when the cards came back online and it was announced over the loud speaker, people just left their carts full of food in the aisles and left.

“Just about everything is gone, I’ve never seen it in that condition,” said Mansfield Walmart customer Anthony Fuller.

Walmart employees could still be seen putting food from the carts away as late as Sunday afternoon. “I was just thinking, I’m so glad my mom doesn’t work here [Walmart] anymore, that’s the only thing I could think about, those employees working, that would have to restock all that stuff,” said O.J Evans who took cell phone video of the overflowing shopping carts at the Mansfield Walmart.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/08/ebt-glitch-frenzy-to-cost-some-louisianans-their-cards-for-a-while/feed/89286394Surprise: ObamaCare will likely increase food stamp enrollmenthttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/06/surprise-obamacare-will-likely-increase-food-stamp-enrollment/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/06/surprise-obamacare-will-likely-increase-food-stamp-enrollment/#commentsWed, 06 Nov 2013 13:41:33 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=285998Once all of the new ObamaCare mandates, regulations, and taxes are fully priced into the healthcare market we may all be lining up for government butter and cheese, but that’s not the story here. No, apparently the multi-million dollar ObamaCare marketing campaign signing up new Medicaid recipients by the millions will come with an unexpected bonus for fans of the entitlement state. Lots and lots of people finding out for the first time that in addition to free healthcare they are also eligible for a shiny new EBT card. Via Politico.

The Obama administration has ordered a study to determine whether the Affordable Care Act, by increasing the number of people eligible for Medicaid, will also increase the number of people enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program based on how states enroll people.

The outcome of the study could show an increase of 3 percent to 5 percent in food stamp recipients in some states from people who were already eligible for SNAP benefits but had not enrolled in the program — which could translate to millions or even billions more in federal spending, Greg Mills, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who is conducting the study, told POLITICO.

“So in percentage terms, it’s not going to be very large, but we’re talking about a very large program,” said Mills, who is investigating the effects of the health care law on SNAP on behalf of the Department of Agriculture’s Food Nutrition Service, the agency that monitors food stamps.

How large? Well, we spent over $78 billion on the program last year so the expected increase would be something in the range of $1.5 to $4 billion. Which, surprise, would go a long way towards offsetting the cuts the GOP thought they had won in the recent budget deal. But here’s what I want to know: is a study on this really necessary? With the ObamaCare enrollment deadline looming, seems to me the bills for any new SNAP enrollees will start rolling in soon enough. Why doesn’t the White House commission something more useful instead? Like a study forecasting the number of employers likely to drop insurance coverage in the next couple of years, or how many part-time employees will have their hours reduced due to the employer mandate. The White House says there is no data to support these “anecdotal” claims, so let’s hop to it guys – prove us wrong.

Of course it wouldn’t be a food stamp story in a liberal rag without a quote from someone praising the proactive effort to sign-up even more people, and Politico doesn’t disappoint. I’m all for a helping hand-up to those in need but is it too much to expect we at least wait until they’ve made a conscious decision to reach out for help first? If our modern day Jeff Spicoli’s are going to get free check-ups now to go along with their sushi, I say we at least make them get off the couch before we sign ’em up.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/11/06/surprise-obamacare-will-likely-increase-food-stamp-enrollment/feed/57285998Farm-bill talks kicking into gear while lobbyists vie for their special interestshttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/23/farm-bill-talks-kicking-into-gear-while-lobbyists-vie-for-their-special-interests/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/23/farm-bill-talks-kicking-into-gear-while-lobbyists-vie-for-their-special-interests/#commentsThu, 24 Oct 2013 01:21:22 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=284247Lots of items about the Obama administration and their Congressional allies’ flurry over ObamaCare’s various woes on the docket today, but lest we forget that the government is still performing its regular task of finding new and exciting ways to spend your money, let me momentarily direct your attention to the farm-bill talks picking up steam behind the scenes. The committee tasked with reconciling the Senate farm bill with the House’s two agriculture policy and food stamps bills are getting down to business, with plans to meet next week, and you know what that means: The many special interests with a dog in this fight will not be denied. Via the NYT:

As the House and Senate prepare to meet next week to work out differences in their farm bills, lobbying efforts are intensifying to get last-minute changes to the 1,000-page legislation that sets the nation’s farm and nutrition policies.

A coalition of budget watchdog groups and a seafood trade group are lobbying to repeal a $20 million catfish inspection program at the Agriculture Department, which was put into the 2008 farm bill at the request of catfish farmers to limit imports. Opponents say it is duplicative because there is already a catfish inspection program at the Food and Drug Administration.

Food banks and other advocates are hoping to stop huge cuts to the food stamp program that they say will cause millions of people to go hungry.

And farm groups are asking lawmakers to maintain certain farm subsidy programs and resist making changes to others, like the sugar program, which limits domestic production and imports. Farm groups have also asked lawmakers to resist changes to the crop insurance program, which environmental groups say provides incentives for farmers to plant crops on land that is not suitable for farming.

So, just the usual stuff, really. Nothing to see here.

Meanwhile, over in South Dakota, regional newspaper Argus Leader was urging a federal appeals court today to reverse a previous ruling blocking the outlet from access to data on how much the government pays to stores that redeem food stamps benefits. The Most Transparent Administration Evah, in their usual fashion, is nixing the newspaper’s FOIA request, via Politico:

Jon Arneson, an attorney for the newspaper, told a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit that a lower court judge misinterpreted the law by ruling that a confidentiality provision for retailer applications allowed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to withhold all data on payments to those retailers. Under the Freedom of Information Act, the newspaper requested the data on annual payments to each retailer approved to take part in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. …

However, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephanie Bengford said the confidentiality provision applies because the cumulative amount of payments to each retailer is based on the series of purchase transactions the stores submit to USDA. …

Arneson called that interpretation of the law “crazy.”

“For us to say that that because the program itself requires this sort of payment or swiping of the card that suddenly that transforms all of that information into private information is—is crazy,” the Argus’s lawyer told the judges. “What we’re simply asking for is how are the tax dollars spent. We’re not trying to invade the privacy of the recipient households.”

Decision still to come.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/23/farm-bill-talks-kicking-into-gear-while-lobbyists-vie-for-their-special-interests/feed/14284247Study: The rapid growth of food stamps hasn’t really helped to reduce hungerhttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/17/study-the-rapid-growth-of-food-stamps-hasnt-really-helped-to-reduce-hunger/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/17/study-the-rapid-growth-of-food-stamps-hasnt-really-helped-to-reduce-hunger/#commentsThu, 17 Oct 2013 21:21:17 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=283382Now that the shutdown is finally over, one of the first items on Congress’s agenda is combining the Senate-passed farm bill with the House’s semi-separated agriculture and food stamps bills into some sort of mutually acceptable version. The end of the shutdown and the Republican — loss? victory? status-quo maintenance? depends on who you ask — could play either way in the highly contentious fight over the already-expired provisions, as one Democratic conferee speculated on Wednesday. Politico reports on the conferees’ meeting:

Present were Senate Agriculture Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and her ranking Republican, Mississippi Sen. Thad Cochran, as well as Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, the ranking Democrat on the House side.

“I think we can get a farm bill. They sounded optimistic to me,” Cochran told POLITICO outside. But members in both parties said it remains to be seen what the fallout will be from the last few weeks of conflict over the government shutdown. …

“Having leadership muck around in this is not helpful,” Peterson told POLITICO. “It could go either way. These guys could exact a pound of flesh out of us because of what’s happened to them with the budget: `We’re going to take it out on the farm bill.’”

“It could go the other way: `We’ve had enough of this we’re going to back off.’ It’s hard to know how it is going to play but I’m concerned about this.

I.e., Democrats are wondering how far Republicans are going to push their oh-so-draconian food-stamp crusade (to cut an utterly hateful 5 percent from an almost $80 billion/year program that has practically doubled in size in the past five years) considering the political optics of the shutdown battle.

Regardless of whatever compromise (or lack thereof) Congress eventually comes up with, we can almost certainly look forward to a huge helping of demagoguery and distortion from the Democrats about how Republicans are such heartless and greedy jerks, because there couldn’t be any other possible motivation in the world for wanting to control the ballooning costs of an explosively growing welfare program and cracking down on eligibility requirements than wanting to hurt poor people out of spite.

They won’t do it, but Democrats should seriously rethink their foregone conclusion that simply throwing more and more money that we don’t have at a very real material problem is the best and only solution for it. A new study from Michael Tanner at the Cato Institute attests to the out-of-control waste, fraud, and negative impacts of the well-intentioned but consequence-riddled and overly-expensive program, and the ways in which the federal government has mounted aggressive outreach campaigns and relaxed eligibility standards to effectively transform SNAP into a long-term welfare program that has done little-to-nothing to actually reduce poverty. A clutch excerpt:

Even setting aside the growing cost and doubtful effectiveness, SNAP is an inefficient, fraud-ridden, and deeply troubled program.

For example, SNAP’s administrative costs are considerably higher than those of most other social welfare programs. In 2013, the program’s total administrative expenses at both the federal and state level are expected to top $7 billion, more than 9 percent of program costs. The federal share of administrative expenses alone is more than $4.5 billion, and that is expected to increase to almost $6 billion by 2023.

SNAP also has a high rate of fraud and abuse. Officially, the USDA puts program fraud at around $858 million last year, which would amount to just a bit more than 1 percent of SNAP expenditures. But this calculation only refers to direct fraud, such as trafficking in benefits. It does not include roughly $2.2 billion annually in erroneous payments to individuals who were not properly eligible for participation or who received benefits in excess of the amount to which they should have been entitled. The erroneous payments raise the total fraud and abuse rate to more than 3.9 percent, making SNAP one of the most frequently abused non–health care social welfare programs.

]]>http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/17/study-the-rapid-growth-of-food-stamps-hasnt-really-helped-to-reduce-hunger/feed/38283382Video: EBT “glitch” sparks run on Walmart shelves in Louisianahttp://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/14/video-ebt-glitch-sparks-run-on-walmart-shelves-in-louisiana/
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/10/14/video-ebt-glitch-sparks-run-on-walmart-shelves-in-louisiana/#commentsMon, 14 Oct 2013 14:41:46 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=282842My, these “glitches” sure do get expensive these days, huh? A computer outage that impacted food-stamp operations in 17 states kept many low-income Americans from buying groceries this weekend:

People in 17 states, including Maryland and Virginia, who tried to buy groceries using electronic food-stamp cards were turned away from supermarkets Saturday as a result of a computer outage.

The system failure affected low-income individuals and families who receive food benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Women, Infants and Children program (WIC).

The outage occurred during a “routine test” of backup systems Saturday morning, Jennifer Wasmer, a spokeswoman for Xerox, which administers the program, said. By late Saturday, access had been restored.

After the system failed, SNAP and WIC beneficiaries in the affected states were unable to buy food using electronic benefit transfers.

“Beneficiary access to programs such as SNAP, TANF, and other programs has been restored to the 17 States where Xerox provides EBT service. Re-starting the EBT system required time to ensure service was back at full functionality,” Wasmer said in a statement.

The problem had nothing to do with the government shutdown, nor with the debate over the farm bill. The money was available (at least through the end of this month), but the computer system couldn’t verify whether the individual consumers had reached their food-stamp limit. The EBT cards function just like a debit card, drawing off of the accounts of recipients until their allotment runs out. Without the computer on line, retailers couldn’t confirm whether they would be repaid, and had to decline purchases until Xerox fixed the problem — which took several hours.

Why couldn’t retailers just ignore the glitch and allow the EBT users to complete their sales? An answer to that question came in Louisiana, where that decision had a disturbing and unintended effect. The regional Walmart office tried to choose the humane option, and got a lesson in price signal opacity through third-party payers:

Shelves in Walmart stores in Springhill and Mansfield, LA were reportedly cleared Saturday night, when the stores allowed purchases on EBT cards even though they were not showing limits.

The chaos that followed ultimately required intervention from local police, and left behind numerous carts filled to overflowing, apparently abandoned when the glitch-spurred shopping frenzy ended.

Springhill Police Chief Will Lynd confirms they were called in to help the employees at Walmart because there were so many people clearing off the shelves. He says Walmart was so packed, “It was worse than any black Friday” that he’s ever seen.

Lynd explained the cards weren’t showing limits and they called corporate Walmart, whose spokesman said to let the people use the cards anyway. From 7 to 9 p.m., people were loading up their carts, but when the cards began showing limits again around 9, one woman was detained because she rang up a bill of $700.00 and only had .49 on her card. She was held by police until corporate Walmart said they wouldn’t press charges if she left the food.

Lynd says at 9 p.m., when the cards came back online and it was announced over the loud speaker, people just left their carts full of food in the aisles and left.

“Just about everything is gone, I’ve never seen it in that condition,” said Mansfield Walmart customer Anthony Fuller.

This should embarrass everyone involved, but the reaction is rational in one sense. The system broke down, creating an artificial shortage of currency, the length of which users could not immediately predict. The market then essentially declared currency unnecessary for transactions, trusting that consumers would act rationally in its absence during a perceived shortage situation. The impulse to hoard should have surprised no one in that situation, and the stores should consider themselves fortunate that a riot didn’t break out.

This is an extreme example of what happens to markets when pricing signals are removed from the consumer. We’ve often used the theoretical example of “food insurance” to demonstrate why costs increase and provider shortages exist in the health-care market, thanks to third-party payers and rationing policies from the government. Consider this a real-world if almost unbelievably extreme demonstration of that argument. The EBT system actually addresses the poverty situation in a rational manner by handing the cash to consumers and staying out of the retail food market, without the intervention of a third-party “insurance” model to create irrational consumption. Perhaps that would have been the better model for health-care reform, too, or at least a better one than Democrats chose with ObamaCare.